The objective of this research is to develop chromatographic procedures with the highest achievable sensitivity for glycoconjugates and lipids in order to allow chemical-morphological correlations in differentiating neural systems. We postulate that developmentally regulated interactions between cell-surface glycoconjugates and complementary cell-surface or extracellular ligands participate in the regulation of specific morphogenetic events during development of the nervous system. Biological systems currently under investigation in this institution, suitable for studies of neural differentiation, are: cerebrocortical neurogenesis in the fetal mouse, cerebellar differentiation in the perinatal mouse, retinotectal connectivity in the chick embryo, hippocampal neurogenesis in the rat, and tissue culture systems of neural origin. The nature of these systems dictates that the limits of analytical technology be pursued in order to quantitate chemical information on a scale sufficiently small to allow meaningful chemical-morphological correlations. In pursuit of these limits, the following approaches for glycolipid, phospholipid and glycoprotein oligosaccharide analysis will be investigated: (1) construction of microbore liquid chromatographic column system with a suitable interfacing injection system and detectors; (2) miniaturization of existing methodology for the isolation of glycolipid and oligosaccharide fractions suitable for micro-HPLC analyses; (3) investigation of alternative derivatization and detection methods, and (4) analysis of phospholipids and the reduced permethylated derivatives of glycolipids and oligosaccharide alcohols with the microbore HPLC interfaced with a Finnegan mass spectrometer.